What is Open Policy Agent (OPA)? A Practical Guide to Policy as Code

This article was originally published on bmf-tech.com . I wanted to learn more about Open Policy Agent, so I referred to the official documentation. What is Open Policy Agent Open Policy Agent (OPA, pronounced "Opa") is an open-source general-purpose policy engine for policy enforcement. It allows you to write policies as code using a declarative language called Rego (pronounced "Ray-go"). Developed by Styra , it is still being developed by Styra and the OSS community. It is recognized as a Graduated project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Overview OPA separates policy decision from policy enforcement. It takes any structured data as input, applies policies, and outputs results. The structured data can be in any format such as JSON, YAML, CSV, or XML. +---------------------+ | Service | +---------------------+ ↑ ↑ Request, Event | | Decision (any JSON value) | | v | +---------------------+ | OPA | +---------------------+ ↑ ↑ Query (any | | JSON value) | | | | +--------